All's Well That Ends Well

 

All’s Well That Ends Well
Single-Sentence
500-Word Exercise

My mother, had she been here to advise me, would have reminded me that, “All’s well that ends well,” but since she died a year and a half ago—or even longer if you consider the dementia that robbed her of her memory years before that—I must be content to think of all the times that things ended well when I firmly believed that they would not, like the time when Sue and I cross-country skied the treacherous slopes at French River State Park, and I stubbornly led the way with one ski burrowing into a drift, the other splaying the other direction leaving me with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament and the firm but disappointing belief that we would have to stay home from our fortieth-year anniversary trip to Peru and Machu Picchu, only to find out from the orthopedic surgeon that no, if Lindsey Vonn can barrel down a mountain at break-neck speed without an ACL, an old man like you can climb Machu Picchu with the help of a brace and physical therapy, or like the time Sue awoke at four in the morning with a bellyache three days before we had planned a three-week camping trip to New Mexico, and the emergency room doctor, having worked the seven nights in a row prior to our visit rubbed his weary eyes and conducted a physical examination that consisted of a single finger poke to her abdomen and declared, “In a woman your age, it’s almost certain to be your gall bladder,” which left Sue in the hospital bed and me in the folding chair next to her thinking what she might have done wrong or what she might have eaten to cause this untimely emergency, but rather than laying blame, we anxiously spent our early-morning hours Googling gall bladder stones, gall bladder treatment, gall bladder surgery, and concluding absolutely, positively that Sue would go to surgery and that we must  delay our departure for a day, a week, or forever, but when the emergency room doctor breezed into the room saying, “That ain’t it, and we have to do a CAT-scan,” we were left more confused and anxious than before, thinking that now we had to worry about hearing the “C-word”—pancreatic Cancer, liver Cancer, colon Cancer, stomach Cancer, esophageal Cancer, what-else-is-down there Cancer, and began asking The Google for every tidbit of knowledge on Cancer since the beginning of time, which gave me an acute abdomen too, and made me wonder if a stomach ulcer could develop in two hours, or if I might be predisposed to the condition since I was a born worrier, having been reminded of my delicate condition by my first-grade teacher, who wrote on my report card, “David is a worry wort,” but then felt relief when the doctor finally came in to say, “All the tests are negative, so all you need is a prescription of Omeprazole,” which reminded me that Mom always said, “All’s well that ends well.”

[If you would like to leave a comment on my blog, click “Publish” before leaving the site. Thanks.]